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there was not enough evidence to conclude that there had been any intercepts. “There is little evidence to prove that the Patriot hit more than a few Scud missiles launched by Iraq during the Gulf War,” a summary of the investigations concluded dryly, “and there are some doubts about even these engagements.” This report — which called on the Pentagon to declassify more information about the performance of the Patriot and request an independent evaluation of the program — never saw the light of day. A fierce lobbying campaign by the Army and Raytheon spiked it, save for a summary.

There is enormous pressure on the Saudi government to show that it is taking steps to defend its citizens. By asserting successful intercepts — assertions that are uncritically spread in headlines — the Saudi government is able to present itself as fulfilling its obligations to protect its population. And, like in 1991, the perception that a defense is working helps keep a lid on regional tensions

The danger here is that leaders in Saudi Arabia and the United States will come to believe their own nonsense. Consider this: Despite that the fact that anonymous U.S. officials have confirmed that there was no successful intercept in November 2017, President Donald Trump had a very different impression: “Our system knocked the missile out of the air,” Trump told reporters the following day. “That’s how good we are. Nobody makes what we make, and now we’re selling it all over the world.” This is a theme Trump has returned to again and again. When asked about the threat from North Korea’s nuclear-armed missiles, Trump said, “We have missiles that can knock out a missile in the air 97 percent of the time, and if you send two of them, it’s going to get knocked down.” Trump has repeatedly given every indication that he believes missile defenses will protect the United States.

Missile defense systems do not represent a solution to the challenge posed by growing missile capabilities or an escape from vulnerability in the nuclear age. There is no magic wand that can “knock down” all the missiles aimed at the United States or its allies. The only solution is to persuade countries not to build these weapons in the first place. If we fail, defenses won’t save us.

New York, Los Angeles, and Miami have joined London as the world’s most desired destinations for laundered money. This boom has enriched the American elites who have enabled it—and it has degraded the nation’s political and social mores in the process. While everyone else was heralding an emergent globalist world that would take on the best values of America, Palmer had glimpsed the dire risk of the opposite: that the values of the kleptocrats would become America’s own. This grim vision is now nearing fruition

in the days after the Twin Towers collapsed, George W. Bush’s administration furiously scoured Washington for ideas to jam into the 342-page piece of legislation that would become the patriot Act. A sense of national panic created a brief moment for bureaucrats to realize previously shelved plans. Title III of the patriot Act, the International Money Laundering Abatement and Anti-terrorist Financing Act, was signed into law little more than a month after September 11

If a bank came across suspicious money transferred from abroad, it was now required to report the transfer to the government. A bank could face criminal charges for failing to establish sufficient safeguards against the flow of corrupt cash. Little wonder that banks fought fiercely against the imposition of so many new rules, which required them to bulk up their compliance divisions—and, more to the point, subjected them to expensive penalties for laxity

nestled in the patriot Act lay the handiwork of another industry’s lobbyists. Every House district in the country has real estate, and lobbyists for that business had pleaded for relief from the patriot Act’s monitoring of dubious foreign transactions. They all but conjured up images of suburban moms staking for sale signs on lawns, ill-equipped to vet every buyer. And they persuaded Congress to grant the industry a temporary exemption from having to enforce the new law.The exemption was a gaping loophole—and an extraordinary growth opportunity for high-end real estate. For all the new fastidiousness of the financial system, foreigners could still buy penthouse apartments or mansions anonymously and with ease, by hiding behind shell companies set up in states such as Delaware and Nevada. Those states, along with a few others, had turned the registration of shell companies into a hugely lucrative racket—and it was stunningly simple to arrange such a Potemkin front on behalf of a dictator, a drug dealer, or an oligarch. According to Global Witness, a London-based anti-corruption NGO founded in 1993, procuring a library card requires more identification in many states than does creating an anonymous shell company.

Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (fatca), legislation with moral clout that belies its stodgy name. Never again would a foreign bank be able to hold American cash without notifying the IRS—or without risking a walloping fine.

As the Treasury Department put it in 2017, nearly one in three high-end real-estate purchases that it monitors involves an individual whom the government has been tracking as “suspicious.” Yet somehow the presence of so many shady buyers has never especially troubled the real-estate industry or, for that matter, politicians. In 2013, New York City’s then-mayor, Michael Bloomberg, asked, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?”

the aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a character who has made recurring cameos in the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The State Department, concerned about Deripaska’s connections to Russian organized crime (which he has denied), has restricted his travel to the United States for years. Such fears have not stood in the way of his acquiring a $42.5 million mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and another estate near Washington’s Embassy Row.

In 2016, Barack Obama’s administration tested a program to bring the real-estate industry in line with the banks, compelling brokers to report foreign buyers, too. The ongoing program, piloted in Miami and Manhattan, could have become the scaffolding for a truly robust enforcement regime. But then the American presidency turned over, and a landlord came to power. Obama’s successor liked selling condos to anonymous foreign buyers—and may have grown dependent on their cash

Nationwide, nearly half of homes worth at least $5 million, the Times found, were bought using shell companies. The proportion was even greater in Los Angeles and Manhattan

Birkenfeld described how he had ensconced himself in the gilded heart of the American plutocracy, attending yacht regattas and patronizing art galleries. He would mingle with the wealthy and strike up conversation. “What I can do for you is zero,” he would say, and then pause before the punch line: “Actually, it’s three zeroes. Zero income tax, zero capital-gains tax, and zero inheritance tax.” Birkenfeld’s unsubtle approach succeeded wildly, as did his bank. As part of an agreement with the Justice Department, UBS admitted to hiding assets totaling some $20 billion in American money.

Around the time that Trump took up occupancy in the White House, the patriot Act’s “temporary” exemption for real estate entered its 15th year

While the U.S. can ask almost any other nation’s banks for financial information about American citizens, it has no obligation to provide other countries with the same. “The United States had bullied the rest of the world into scrapping financial secrecy,” Bullough writes, “but hadn’t applied the same standards to itself.” A Zurich-based lawyer vividly spelled out the consequences to Bloomberg: “How ironic—no, how perverse—that the USA, which has been so sanctimonious in its condemnation of Swiss banks, has become the banking secrecy jurisdiction du jour … That ‘giant sucking sound’ you hear? It is the sound of money rushing to the USA.”

The behavior of the American elite changed too. Members of the professional classes competed to sell their services to kleptocrats

“They don’t send lawyers to jail, because we run the country … We’re still members of a privileged class in this country.”

Once upon a time, it might have been possible to think of Manafort as a grubby outlier in Washington—the lobbyist with the lowest standards, willing to take on the most egregious clients. But Mueller has exposed just how tightly tethered Manafort’s work on behalf of Ukrainian kleptocrats was to Washington’s permanent elite. Manafort subcontracted some of his lobbying to the firm of Tony Podesta, arguably the most powerful Democratic influence-peddler of his generation. And Manafort employed Mercury Public Affairs, where he dealt with Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman and a former chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy

The perils of corruption were an obsession of the Founders. In the summer of 1787, James Madison mentioned corruption in his notebook 54 times. To read the transcripts of the various constitutional conventions is to see just how much that generation worried about the moral quality of public behavior—and how much it wanted to create a system that defined corruption more expansively than the French or British systems had, and that fostered a political culture with higher ethical ambitions

The defining document of our era is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. The ruling didn’t just legalize anonymous expenditures on political campaigns. It redefined our very idea of what constitutes corruption, limiting it to its most blatant forms: the bribe and the explicit quid pro quo. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion crystallized an ever more prevalent ethos of indifference—the collective shrug in response to tax avoidance by the rich and by large corporations, the yawn that now greets the millions in dark money spent by invisible billionaires to influence elections.

American collusion with kleptocracy comes at a terrible cost for the rest of the world. All of the stolen money, all of those evaded tax dollars sunk into Central Park penthouses and Nevada shell companies, might otherwise fund health care and infrastructure. (A report from the anti-poverty group One has argued that 3.6 million deaths each year can be attributed to this sort of resource siphoning.) Thievery tramples the possibilities of workable markets and credible democracy. It fuels suspicions that the whole idea of liberal capitalism is a hypocritical sham: While the world is plundered, self-righteous Americans get rich off their complicity with the crooks.

The Founders were concerned that venality would become standard procedure, and it has. Long before suspicion mounted about the loyalties of Donald Trump, large swaths of the American elite—lawyers, lobbyists, real-estate brokers, politicians in state capitals who enabled the creation of shell companies—had already proved themselves to be reliable servants of a rapacious global plutocracy

by the time Vladimir Putin attempted to influence the shape of our country, it was already bending in the direction of his

Sukarno, like many Indonesians, including the PKI, believed the creation of a Malaysian federation was unwarranted regional interference by the British to maintain their colonial dominance.

Like its US and Australian allies, Britain feared a communist Indonesia. The PKI had three million members and was close to Mao’s China. In Washington the fall of the Indonesia “domino” into the communist camp was seen as a greater threat than the potential loss of Vietnam.

Suharto, appointed supreme army commander on 14 October, used the rebellion to undermine and eventually overthrow Sukarno, and as what historian John Roosa has called a “pretext for mass murder”: the elimination of the PKI in a series of massacres across Indonesia that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

British intelligence agencies and propaganda specialists were complicit, carrying out covert operations to undermine Sukarno’s regime and eliminate the PKI by blaming them for the Untung coup.

Reddaway had served in the army during the second world war before joining the Foreign Office and playing a key role in the establishment of IRD. After the failed Untung coup he arrived to take charge of the British operation. His brief was simple. In an interview in 1996 with two of the authors, he said he’d been given a budget of £100,000 by the Foreign Office and was told “to do anything I could do to get rid of Sukarno”. Only now do we know what “anything” fully meant.

“No, we do not cry out for violence,” the IRD propagandists wrote, “but we demand in the name of all patriotic people that this communist cancer be cut out of the body of the state.” The PKI “is now a wounded snake”, they wrote: “Now is the time to kill it before it has a chance to recover.”

Detailed historical research has established that the mass killings of PKI party members and alleged supporters appear to have been triggered by local army commanders or the arrival of army special forces, about three weeks after the botched coup had been put down by Suharto.During that period the media in Indonesia was full of black propaganda against the PKI and its alleged atrocities, as the army whipped up popular anger against communists and legitimised what Roosa has described as its “already-planned moves against the PKI and President Sukarno”.

The newsletters were approved by IRD in London before dispatch. Copies sent to senior Foreign Office officials were destroyed after reading at IRD’s request.

“Anyone who was leftist was picked up. They were very systematic. They targeted all the leftist groups and not just PKI. People kept themselves to themselves and only talked in whispers.”

As the massacres progressed in the autumn of 1965, IRD’s unit in Singapore reassured their readers as to the necessity of the slaughter.In Newsletter 21 they wrote: “Unless we maintain a vigorous campaign to eradicate communism … the red menace will envelop us again.”The stakes were life and death. “We are fighting for our lives and the very existence of Indonesia and we must never forget that. THE CATS ARE WAITING TO POUNCE!”In Newsletter 23 Winchester Road’s propagandists praised “the fighting services and the police” for “doing an excellent job”. Sukarno, then trying to restrain the generals, was wrong: “Communism must be abolished in all its forms. The work started by the army must be carried on and intensified.” The authors finished by equating the PKI to Hitler and Genghis Khan.

What Gilchrist wanted and what became the unit’s mission was the production of black propaganda, apparently produced by patriotic Indonesian émigrés abroad, to stir Indonesian anti-communists into action.The influential targets of a propaganda newsletter, according to a declassified report by Wynne, would eventually include “as many personages in the hierarchy of government, army and civil service as we can find”.To disguise the British origin of the newsletter it was sent into Indonesia via Asian cities including Hong Kong, Tokyo and Manila.

In the 1996 interviews Reddaway boasted of manipulating the British and other global media to take an anti- Sukarno and PKI line but insisted IRD only passed on true facts and did not use black propaganda.As ever with IRD, Reddaway told us a partial truth. According to a memo he had written: “The bludgeon was surprisingly effective because we were able … to supply publicists with information which they could not find from other sources because of Sukarno’s censorship.”

“GCHQ could break and read Indonesian codes without difficulty. The government was among many third world countries using equipment supplied by Swiss-based company Crypto AG. For over 50 years, Crypto AG supplied secretly sabotaged cypher machines, with built-in back doors to which the CIA and GCHQ had keys.”

The newsletters remained the core work of Ed Wynne and his colleagues in Winchester Road. A key theme was to encourage their influential readers to support the army’s campaign against the communists. They urged Indonesian patriots: “The PKI and all it stands for must be eliminated for all time.”We now know that to do that they included sensationalised lies. On 5 November the pro-military Jakarta Daily Mail claimed that on the day of the Untung coup 100 women from PKI’s Gerwani women’s organisation had tortured one of the generals using razor blades and knives to slash his genitals before he was shot.The story of the torture and mutilation of the generals by the Gerwani women became part of the founding myth of Suharto’s regime, used to justify the destruction of the PKI. It was also, according to Roosa, a pretext for murder. A lie propagated by the Indonesian army, regurgitated and repurposed to incite IRD’s influential readers.

The IRD was deliberately silent on the massacres. One document from December 1965 says they should “do nothing to embarrass the generals” and the newsletter carefully itemises accounts of isolated incidents of PKI brutality but makes no explicit mention of the army’s killings.

By early 1966 the mass murders in Indonesia, if not their scale, were well known.In January Robert F Kennedy compared the massacres to “inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the communists” and asked when people would “speak out … against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged communists have not been perpetrators, but victims?”

Wynne regarded the operation as a success. In his 1966 annual report he proudly says his operation was “fairly successful” because all his enemies (Konfrontasi, Sukarno, Subandrio and the PKI) were “destroyed”.

According to Prof Scott Lucas of the University of Birmingham, the declassified documents show that: “Britain was prepared to engage in dirty deeds which ran contrary to its purported values.” They reveal, he says, “how important black propaganda was to give the illusion that Britain could wield global power – even if many people might be killed for that illusion”.

Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia is not a global ground combat power.

Russia has employed heavily armed mercenaries from the notorious Wagner Group and a range of other (PDF) government-cozy (and perhaps government-run) companies as the tip of the Russian foreign policy spear. In effect, Russia has outsourced its foreign policy in Libya, Syria, the Central African Republic, Madagascar, Mozambique, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen, Burundi, and other global hot spots.

Dmitry Utkin, former commander of the Russian military intelligence directorate's (GRU's) Spetsnaz special forces units, allegedly founded the Wagner Group in 2014. Wagner and an elite GRU Spetsnaz unit reportedly share a military base in the Russian town of Molkino.

RAND's work on will to fight—the disposition and decision to fight, act, or persevere in conflict and war—and on Russian state power suggests that Russia is using mercenaries due in great part to its inherent military and civil weaknesses. Russian mercenaries (in fact, all mercenaries) also have behavioral limitations and vulnerabilities to influence. Dependence on mercenaries also reflects a vulnerability in Russian national will to fight. Both of these weaknesses can be exploited.

Mercenary soldiers with the Wagner Group (formerly Moran Security Group, and then Slavonic Corps Limited) and other Russian mercenary groups like Patriot, took the lead in some of the more dangerous frontline operations in Syria while uniformed Russian soldiers guarded air and naval bases along Syria's coastline

Russia's military has strictly limited ability to project ground power worldwide. It has almost no organic ability to project and sustain ground power more than a few hundred kilometers beyond its own borders. Russian strategic lift is anemic compared to Soviet-era lift. Available forces are often tied down in one of the many frozen conflicts that ring Russia's western and southern borders.

In February 2018, Russian-hired mercenaries led (or at least closely accompanied) a Syrian militia force armed with artillery and heavy tanks to seize an oilfield near the city of Deir az-Zour in northeastern Syria. American Special Operations Forces and Marines decimated them with hours of precision air attacks, killing perhaps (PDF) hundreds and causing the rest of the force—including the mercenaries—to flee. As Russian-hired mercenary personnel retreated from the battlefield at Deir az-Zour, other teams of Russian private military actors had to call in helicopter teams to evacuate the wounded from the battlefield in the absence of state support.

Russian mercenaries have also performed poorly in Africa. In Mozambique, Wagner mercenaries stumbled through the kinds of partner-building efforts at which U.S. special operations forces tend to excel. They offended the locals and reportedly double-crossed allies to make money. Islamic State insurgents have successfully attacked and killed them on poorly secured roads. Mercenary disinformation tactics in Mozambique backfired. What was billed as a Russian power play in a former Soviet client state looks like a disaster in the making.

Wagner sent hundreds of trainers and security personnel to the Central African Republic to help Russian commercial interests secure mining rights and to support a complex regional diplomatic push to increase Russian influence. There has been little pretense in this operation: It is primarily a money-making venture. In one case, Wagner mercenaries reportedly helped the rebels they were hired to fight in order to help a Russian mining company gain access to diamond mines. Wagner has been linked to the suspicious deaths of three journalists who were nosing around its CAR operations. This Russian mercenary-led deployment has been partially successful in countering French influence, but it is not clear that reported successes on the ground outweigh the lasting, negative consequences of Wagner's cutthroat behavior.

Russia sent mercenaries and probably some active military forces to support Khalifa Haftar's anti-government forces in Libya. In early 2020, 1,000 Wagner mercenaries reportedly fled the front lines between pro- and anti-government forces after suffering a resounding defeat. Combat losses for Wagner in Libya are unknown but possibly significant.

as individuals and as a group, Russian mercenaries have repeatedly shown that they will pursue self-interest and commercial interests over state interests, and that they will quickly abandon partner forces—and perhaps each other—when the tactical risks fail to outweigh the financial rewards.

There is no shortage of genuine tough guys in groups like Wagner and Patriot. Under the will to fight factor of quality, many Russian mercenaries would earn high marks for fitness and resilience. But outright toughness and even elite military training alone cannot sustain the will to fight of an individual primarily motivated by money.

Together, the weaknesses within Russian mercenary forces and within the Russian state in relation to press-ganged youths, conscripts, and casualties may offer ready opportunities for exploitation in great-power competition. These broader weaknesses in Russian national will to fight could be examined to identify more ways to prevent Russia from aggressively undermining Western democracy.

he offered an angrier but less coherent denunciation of the west, more angry taxi driver than head of state. “They don’t want us to be free, they want us to be a colony; they don’t want equal partnership, they want to steal from us,”

“Putin’s speech is a set of unbelievably illiterate conspiracy cliches that 30 years ago could be read in marginal national-patriotic newspapers.“Now it has become the policy of the former superpower, which even in the days of the Soviet leaders could not afford such a discourse.”

in his March 2014 speech, Putin explicitly ruled out seizing more territory: “Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea … We do not need this.”

annexation involves more than pieces of paper, and while in 2014 Russia had just carried out a swift and stealthy military operation to seize Crimea, this time things are far less clear-cut. Fighting continues in and around all four of the regions Russia is claiming, prompting the mobilisation order.

While Putin has talked for two decades about the west’s desire to destroy Russia, the intensity and repetition with which he tackled the subject on Friday suggests this is not just political theatre: he has become a true believer.

“Nobody knows. I doubt if he knows yet either, to be honest,”

this combination of irredentist cartography and rhetoric nonetheless offers some insight into Turkey’s current foreign and domestic policies and Ankara’s self-image. The maps, in particular, reveal the continued relevance of Turkish nationalism, a long-standing element of the country’s statecraft, now reinvigorated with some revised history and an added dose of religion

Government rhetoric has been quick to invoke the heroism of Turkey’s war of independence in describing the popular resistance to the country’s July 15 coup attempt. And alongside the Ottomans, Erdogan routinely references the Seljuks, a Turkic group that preceded the Ottomans in the Middle East by several centuries, and even found a place for more obscure pre-Islamic Turkic peoples like the Gokturks, Avars, and Karakhanids that first gained fame in Ataturk’s 1930s propaganda

Erdogan, by contrast, has given voice to an alternative narrative in which Ataturk’s willingness in the Treaty of Lausanne to abandon territories such as Mosul and the now-Greek islands in the Aegean was not an act of eminent pragmatism but rather a betrayal. The suggestion, against all evidence, is that better statesmen, or perhaps a more patriotic one, could have gotten more.

Criticism of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy is now as likely to come from the Arab world as anywhere else

while countries like Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary brought disaster on themselves by trying to forcibly rewrite their postwar borders, Turkey — under Ataturk and his successor — wisely resisted this urge

The Sultan Murad Brigade, comprising predominantly ethnic Turkmens, has been one of Ankara’s military assets inside Syria against both Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the PKK. Meanwhile, the Turkmen population living around Mosul and its surrounding area has been a concern and an asset for Ankara in Iraq. Turkish special forces have worked with the Iraqi Turkmen Front since at least 2003 in order to expand Turkish influence and counter the PKK in northern Iraq.

Turkish minorities in northern Greece and Cyprus have played a similar role. That is, their well-being has been a subject of genuine concern for Turkish nationalists but also a potential point of leverage with Athens to be used as needed

Erdogan has also emphasized a new element to Turkey’s communitarian foreign-policy agenda: Sunni sectarianism

Erdogan’s new sectarianism is evident in Mosul, where Turkey has warned of the risks to Sunnis should Shiite militias take control of the city. But the policy’s influence is clearest in Syria, where Turkey has been supporting Sunni rebels aiming to topple the Assad regime (including those now struggling to hold the city of Aleppo). In both Iraq and Syria, however, Turkey’s sectarianism has not been allowed to trump pragmatism. Ankara has been keen to maintain a mutually beneficial economic relationship with Iran despite backing opposite sides in Syria and in the past year has also expressed its willingness to make peace with Assad if circumstances require it.

the points at which Turkey has proved susceptible to irredentism in the past have all come at moments of change and uncertainty similar to what the Middle East is experiencing today. In 1939, Ankara annexed the province of Hatay, then under French control, by taking advantage of the crisis in Europe on the eve of World War II

Ankara is all too aware of the fact that the power to do so remains the only rationale for foreign intervention that matters

Trump is under no such burden. Because his only responsibility over the past 25 years has been mismanaging the fortune he inherited, cultivating celebrity, courting a series of wives, and presiding over a reality TV show, he is free to criticize Clinton and her phalanx of advisors and appeal to the voters’ worst instincts with vague and wildly optimistic promises of his own. Knowledgeable foreign-policy experts have been quick to attack his various proposals, but these experts may not have much street cred this year.

Under Haley, senior staff meetings are mostly limited to political appointees, several people who have left the U.S. Mission told me. The same pattern that holds across much of the State Department—when meetings are held at all

Experts on complex issues and regions have repeatedly found themselves left out of policy debates and drafting processes, as when Haley gave a speech in early September at the American Enterprise Institute that panned the Iran nuclear deal. Iran experts in the State Department, including those who had helped craft the agreement and knew its inner workings, were never even given a chance to review the speech, which contained multiple inaccuracies and whose arguments—in the words of the libertarian Cato Institute—“carefully skirted around the actual facts.”

as more people leave, fewer are coming in. In June 2017, the number of Americans who took the Foreign Service exam fell by 26 percent compared with June 2016, the lowest number in nearly a decade. So not only is the Trump administration losing some of the best diplomats from our current generation, but it is also failing to attract top talent from the next generation

it would be a mistake not to recognize their mounting departures for the serious problem it is. What makes our nation’s institutions strong is not just the core principles that have evolved over the course of our history, but the individuals who put those principles into practice, no matter who the president is. Our institutions will be effective in advancing our interests only if they can continue to attract and retain the public servants who represent what is best in us and in our country. That more and more of those individuals do not see a place for themselves in the Trump administration should concern us all

the vast sums Americans have spent trying to nation-build, spread democracy, or defeat all “terrorists of global reach” inevitably left fewer resources available to help Americans at home (including the veterans of the country’s protracted wars)

the over $6 trillion spent on what Bush dubbed the “war on terror”—including the money spent on unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—could surely have been spent helping Americans live more comfortable and secure lives at home (or merely left in taxpayers’ pockets). Add to the list the decisions to promote rapid globalization and financial deregulation, which did significant harm to some sectors of the economy and led to the 2008 financial crisis, and you begin to see why confidence in the elite has taken a hit.

running an ambitious and highly interventionist foreign policy—and, in particular, one that tries to manipulate, manage, and ultimately shape the internal politics of foreign countries—requires a lot of deception. To sustain public support for it, elites have to spend a lot of time inflating threats, exaggerating benefits, acting in secret, and manipulating what the public is told

the architects of failure are rarely, if ever, held accountable

Once back in office, they are free to repeat their previous mistakes, backed by a chorus of pundits whose recommendations never change no matter how often they’ve failed.

The United States set out to remake the world in its image, and when some parts of that world pushed back, it reacted the way that most societies do when they are attacked. Americans got scared, lashed out even more, stopped thinking clearly and strategically, and looked around for someone to blame

the Republican Party’s decision to pin its political future on gerrymandering, voter suppression, and mobilizing a shrinking base and not on trying to appeal to the median voter is surely part of the problem, too, along with the twisted soul of Trump himself

Endless campaigns abroad unleash a host of political forces—militarism, secrecy, enhanced executive authority, xenophobia, faux patriotism, demagoguery, etc.—all of them contrary to the civic virtues on which a healthy democracy depends

Former President George W. Bush explicitly stated that the United States was not at war with Islam, but nativist voices embraced the clash of civilizations narrative, and the ensuing war on “Islamic terrorism” enabled and perpetuated Islamophobia at home and abroad

while both terrorism and the coronavirus are themselves nonhuman entities, their invocation as foes has fueled dangerous xenophobia with very human consequences

one of the key lessons of the 9/11 period is the ease of viewing the military as the tool of first resort, despite its powerlessness in solving political or humanitarian problems

neither the coronavirus response nor the war on terrorism created xenophobia; rather, they exacerbated existing prejudices and inequities

another pair of post-9/11 measures that are once again on the table: an increase in what the government knows about the public and a decrease in what the public knows about the government.

Data-mining firms like Palantir already have contracts in place with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Some U.S. analysts argue that the coronavirus vindicates the highly surveilled Chinese internet. Others have urged the adoption of tracking methods similar to those used by the government of Singapore, pointing out that U.S. governors can use post-9/11 legislation to force citizens to comply.

the 9/11 era showed that government surveillance—especially when implemented hastily—has the tendency to expand inertially. The Patriot Act’s scope grew in the years after its adoption, resulting in the mass collection of millions of Americans’ metadata (which a government oversight board later deemed not only illegal but also of minimal effectiveness in fighting terrorism). That law has also been applied well beyond its initial counterterrorism intent, including in cases of mortgage and food-stamp fraud.

The post-9/11 era was rife with anti-democratic secrecy, and today, the executive branch is again claiming emergency powers to evade accountability. Trump used the coronavirus as a pretext for suspending immigration—not for health reasons but, he claimed, to prevent competition from immigrant labor. He also decapitated the watchdog panel tasked with overseeing $2.2 trillion in economic relief and named a partisan ally to fill a critical inspector general role. In a haunting echo of the post-9/11 era’s habeas corpus debates, last month the Justice Department requested authorization from Congress to be able to detain Americans indefinitely during a state of emergency such as a pandemic.

Free flows of news and information create political pressure to make smart and life-saving decisions. Policymakers avoid corruption if they know their constituents are watching. By clamping down on hallmarks of democratic accountability, post-9/11 policies curtailed valuable liberties while making the United States less safe

The Observer last year revealed the IRD’s major campaign in Indonesia in 1965 that helped encourage anti-communist massacres which left hundreds of thousands dead. There, the IRD prepared pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact were created by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.

“The UK did not simply invent material, as the Soviets systematically did, but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across.”

“reports” sent to warn other governments, selected journalists and thinktanks about “Soviet subversion” or similar threats.The reports comprised carefully selected facts and analysis often gleaned from intelligence provided by Britain’s security services, but appeared to come from ostensibly independent analysts and institutions that were in reality set up and run by the IRD. One of the first of these, set up in 1964, was the International Committee for the Investigation of Communist Front Organisations.

In early 1963, the IRD forged a statement from the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Soviet front organisation, which denounced Africans as uncivilised, “primitive” and morally weak. The forgery received press coverage across the continent, with many newspapers reacting intemperately.

The IRD also forged literature purporting to come from the Muslim Brotherhood, a mass Islamist organisation that had a significant following across the Middle East. One pamphlet accused Moscow of encouraging the 1967 war, criticised the quality of Soviet military equipment, and called the Soviets “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as little more than “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic superstitions”.AdvertisementThe IRD also created an entirely fictive radical Islamist organisation called the League of Believers, which attacked the Russians as non-believers and blamed Arab defeats on a lack of religious faith, a standard trope among religious conservatives at the time.

The IRD’s leaflets echoed other claims made by radical Islamists, arguing that military misdeeds should not be blamed on “the atheists or the imperialists or the Zionist Jews” but on “Egyptians who are supposed to be believers”.

Other material highlighted the poor view that Moscow took of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the limited aid offered by the Soviets to Palestinian armed nationalist groups. This was contrasted with the more supportive stance of the Chinese, in a bid to widen the split between the two communist powers.

One major initiative focused on undermining Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, the former colony that unilaterally declared its independence from the UK in 1965 in an attempt to maintain white minority rule.The IRD set up a fake group of white Rhodesians who opposed Smith. Its leaflets attacked him for lying, creating “chaos” and crippling the economy. “The whole world is against us … We must call a halt while we can still save our country,”

Between 1965 and 1972, the IRD forged at least 11 statements from Novosti, the Soviet state-run news agency. One followed Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 six-day war against Israel and underlined Soviet anger at Egypt’s “waste” of so much of the arms and materiel Moscow had supplied to the country.

A similar forgery in 1966 underlined the “backwardness” and “political immaturity” of Africa. Another, a statement purportedly from Novosti, blamed poor academic results at an international university in Moscow on the quality of the black African students enrolled there. The IRD sent more than 1,000 copies to addresses across the developing world.

As with most such efforts, the impact of the IRD’s campaigns was often difficult to judge. On one occasion, IRD officials were able to report that a newspaper in Zanzibar printed one of their forgeries about Soviet racism, and that the publication prompted an angry response. This was seen as a major achievement. Officials were also pleased when Kenyan press used fake material about the 1967 six-day war, and when newspapers across much of the Islamic world printed a fake Novosti bulletin on the conflict. Occasionally, western newspapers unwittingly used IRD materials, too.

Though the IRD was shut down in 1977, researchers are now finding evidence that similar efforts continued for almost another decade.“The [new documents] are particularly significant as a precursor to more modern efforts of putting intelligence into the public domain.“Liz Truss has a ’government information cell’, and defence intelligence sends out daily tweets to ‘pre-but’ Russian plots and gain the upper hand in the information war, but for much of the cold war the UK used far more devious means,” Cormac said.